By Gyorgy Doczi
One of the delights of life is the discovery and rediscovery
of patterns of order and beauty in nature - the designs revealed
by slicing through a head of cabbage or an orange, the forms
of shells and butterfly wings. These images are awesome not just
for their beauty alone, but because they suggest an order underlying
their growth, a harmony existing in nature. What does it mean
that such an order exists, how far does it extend?
The Power of Limits was inspired by those simple discoveries
of harmony. The author then went on to investigate and measure
hundreds of patterns - ancient and modern, minute and vast. His
discovery, vividly illustrated here, is that certain proportions
occur over and over again in all these forms. Patterns are also
repeated in how things grow and are made - by the dynamic union
of opposites - as demonstrated by the spirals which move in opposite
directions in the growth of a plant.
The joining of unity and diversity in the discipline of proportional limitations creates forms that are beautiful to us because they embody the principles of the cosmic order of which we are a part; conversely, the limitlessness of that order is revealed by the strictness of its forms. The author shows how we, as humans, are included in the universal harmony of form, and suggests that the union of complementary opposites may be a way to extend that harmony to the psychological and social realms as well.
Gyorgy Doczi has practiced architecture
in Hungary, Sweden, Iran and the United States. He initiated
a permanent exhibit on form in nature and art at the Pacific
Science Center in Seattle, and is a founder of the Friends of
Jungian Psychology Northwest. He lives in Seattle.
Format:
softcover, 150 pages,
$27.00
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